


Knowing I'm On the Street Where You Live

by nik_knows_nothing



Series: The Street Where You Live [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, Fluff, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Endgame, Relationship Upgrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 13:13:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: Parker doesn't come back to school for the next two weeks.This is fine, MJ thinks.This is probably definitely good, because it mean's he's doing—something. Right?So this is definitely okay.





	Knowing I'm On the Street Where You Live

Parker doesn’t come back to school for the next two weeks.

This is fine, MJ thinks.

This is probably definitely pretty good, because it means he’s doing—something. Right?

It means things are going to be better.

So this is definitely okay.

That’s what she tells herself on the first couple days, and then something happens on the third day that completely changes the game.

To use the cliché.

MJ’s sitting at her usual table, checking over her questions for practice after school, and then there’s a blur of motion, and Ned is sliding into the bench right next to her.

“Um,” MJ says. “What is this?”

Because the last time she checked, she and Parker and Leeds have a very carefully-constructed social contract for their interactions, and that contract stipulates that she will sit at the table with them and interact when necessary, but only when absolutely necessary.

This is—something new.

“You went to go look for Peter,” Ned says. “Did you ever find him?”

For a second, MJ has to race to put the conversation into context, but then she remembers all at once, the way she’d promised Ned she was going to find their teammate, how reluctantly he had wandered off.

“Oh,” she says. “Right.”

She hasn’t forgotten.

She really hasn’t.

She’d remembered that she’d spoken to Ned, it’s just that she hasn’t really been thinking about that as much as she’s been thinking about—other people.

Other things, in general.

“Well?” Ned prompts, when she doesn’t say anything else. “Did you find him?”

“Uh, I did,” MJ says. “Yeah. Caught up with him on the way home.”

As soon as she says it, she knows she’s made a mistake.

Ned settles back slightly, studies her with an expression that’s completely unreadable, which is equal parts scary and impressive, considering that this is Ned she’s talking to here.

“Huh,” he says. “That’s funny.”

MJ pokes at her lunch and doesn’t answer.

“Because I talked to him earlier today,” Ned continues, voice heavy with meaning. “And he said he didn’t see you. Not after school.”

_Right._

Because she didn’t see him.

She saw Spider-Man.

There’s a difference.

“Well, then,” MJ says, aiming for an air of casual dismissal. “Maybe his memory’s faulty.”

“See,” Ned says immediately. “That’s what I thought.”

“Good for you, Leeds.”

“But then the weirdest thing happened.”

Something about his tone sets her on edge, and she looks up from her book to see him scrolling through his phone, pulling up something in particular.

“So I was looking at Spider-Man sightings on the world wide web—”

“Why?”

“Reasons,” Ned says, and then apparently finds whatever he was looking for on his phone. “And then I found this picture from a couple days ago.”

MJ’s heart sinks.

Absently, she considers making a run for the cafeteria door.

Better to wait, though.

Figure out exactly how much Ned knows.

“Do tell,” she says.

“Admittedly, it _is_ kind of hard to see,” Ned says, studying the picture on his phone like it’s the most fascinating thing in the universe. “But it sure looks an awful lot like Spider-Man sitting on the edge of a roof.”

MJ remembers the way the wind had tugged at her hair, remembers the rasp of metal as she picked her way up the ladder, the grate of the ceramic plate against the tiles of the roof.

Aloud, she says, “How exciting.”

“And the thing is,” Ned says, ignoring her tone. “I’m not sure, because it really is kind of a crazy grainy picture, but it _looks_ like he’s not alone.”

“Again,” MJ says. “How exciting.”

“MJ,” Ned says, and she tears herself away from her close inspection of her book binding to see him watching her, careful and nervous. “You talked to Spider-Man.”

“I do that occasionally,” she says, and he frowns.

“Is this, like, a thing? Is this a thing I didn’t know about?”

MJ sets her book down, because they’ve gotten to the point where she figures at least one of them ought to stop beating around the bush.

“You really want to gossip, Leeds?”

“No,” Ned says, serious as she’s ever seen him. “I want to know why you told me you were going to find Peter Parker and then cropped up on a roof with Spider-Man just a little while later.”

MJ considers him. “Maybe Spider-Man was helping me look,” she offers, and it’s a hollow excuse.

“ _MJ_ ,” Ned says again. “Is that what was happening?”

She can’t help but bristle at his tone, just a little. “It could’ve been.”

“Was it?”

MJ doesn’t answer.

Ned seems to take that as her response.

He looks away, and MJ finds herself studying the cover of her book once more before a vague concern about security pricks at the back of her mind and she glances up again.

“That picture—” she starts to ask, and Ned waves his hand.

“I’ve deleted it.”

MJ blinks. “That’s a thing you can do?”

“It is now,” Ned says, and then laughs a little at the look on her face. “I’ve had kind of a steep learning curve.”

MJ thinks about how long Ned’s been doing this, about the crazy triple detention he earned the night of homecoming, how he still swears up and down to anyone that’ll listen that he was just looking at porn, it’s not a big deal, most healthy adolescents experiment with their sexuality at this late stage of development, and really, for them to punish him for it—

It’s just a coincidence, that he fled the gym only seconds after Peter Parker.

“Yeah,” MJ says, and thinks about sitting on the edge of a roof again, searching for the right words that just won’t come, “I know.”

Ned watches her a second longer.

“Does Peter?” he asks, when she raises her eyebrows at him.

MJ tilts her head in exaggerated confusion. “Does Peter know about your learning curve?”

He doesn’t take the bait.

“Does Peter know that you went looking for his superhero alter ego immediately after telling me you were going to go talk to him?”

_Does Peter know?_

_Have you told Peter yet?_

_Does he know?_

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” MJ grumbles. “Stark, and Liz, and now you—”

“Liz knows?” Ned’s eyes are wide and panicky, and MJ catches herself mid-sentence, curses herself for not being able to keep a filter on when she talks.

“Um,” she says. “No.”

Ned narrows his eyes, clearly suspicious, and MJ rushes to get the conversation back on track.

“No, I haven’t told Peter,” she says, and then frowns at the way that sounds like a concession of defeat. “Not yet. I was going to. But then—stuff happened.”

“Yeah,” Ned says, and snaps his fingers, which isn’t his usual tic, but whatever. “So I’ve heard.”

“God,” MJ says, thinking about what Parker told her, and also about how casually Ned is discussing this, in the middle of the crowded cafeteria. “You know, it’s a miracle the whole school doesn’t know already. You two are not exactly the most inconspicuous secret keepers.”

“Are you kidding?” Ned demands. “No one’s found out, and it’s been—”

“I found out a month after the Accords, Leeds.”

“Oh,” he says. “Wait, really?”

“Really.”

“Huh.”

“But if I _didn’t_ know,” MJ adds, because this is real, and this is a thing they need to take into consideration. “I would’ve figured it out before homecoming. I mean, you guys were literally talking about Captain America, like, half a foot away from me. In public.”

“We—we didn’t—we were careful,” he sputters, and MJ raises an eyebrow.

“Careful,” she echoes, and makes a show of looking around them. “Right.”

Ned follows her gaze, and shifts a little in his seat, so that when MJ looks back at him, he’s looking serious again, lowering his voice and leaning in just a very little bit.

“Have you told anyone else?”

MJ thinks about it. “You mean other than the federal government?”

“ _MJ_.”

“No,” she says. “Ned, of course I haven’t.”

It doesn’t feel like it would be enough of an assurance—at least, it wouldn’t if she were in his shoes, she’s pretty sure—

But Ned just studies her for a second longer and then sits back again, apparently satisfied.

“I didn’t think you would,” he says, easy as anything, just like that. “I told Mr. Stark you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah?” MJ can’t help feeling like Stark probably isn’t her biggest fan. “What’d he say to that?”

“Oh,” Ned says, and waves his hand again, digging into his backpack to pull out his brown bag lunch. “Stuff.”

“Stuff,” she echoes. “Yeah.”

“You going to tell me?”

“Nope.” Ned pops the lid off a Tupperware container full of pancit, stabs at it with a fork. “You know why not?”

MJ watches him and wonders if she could convince him to trade lunches. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Because I’m good at keeping secrets.”

“Ha,” MJ says.

Ned grins, looking way too proud of himself, and they sit in silence for a little while, Ned working on his lunch and MJ on her book.

Lunch is more than halfway over when Ned clears his throat, and MJ glances over to see him studying his fork.

“So that’s the first thing,” he says. “I kind of knew that one was coming.”

“Good instinct,” MJ says, because, again, it’s really a miracle the whole school doesn’t know by now.

“Which brings us to the second question.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Do you have a crush on Peter?”

MJ chokes on literally nothing.

To his credit, Ned doesn’t look too smug when she nearly coughs herself to death right there at the cafeteria.

He reaches out and pats her once on the back, like he’s not quite sure if that’s helping, which it really, _really_ isn’t—

“What?” MJ manages at last. “I— _what?_ ”

“Huh,” Ned says, and passes her a water bottle from his backpack. “I thought you were going to deny it flat out.”

MJ swallows about half the water bottle at once, glares at him with watery eyes. “Did you ask Stark’s opinion on that, too?”

“No, he offered his own advice.”

Oh, God, he talked to Stark about this?

“Which should automatically be taken with a grain of salt.” MJ mutters, but Ned just crosses his arms and looks at her, unimpressed.

“You’re deflecting.”

“I am,” she says. “I am, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“I’m not a superhero.”

The sudden non-sequitur throws her off, and she pauses. “No offense, but I kind of knew that part, too.”

“Good instinct,” Ned says, in close to the same tone as she used earlier.

MJ looks at the water bottle, and then back at him, and narrows her eyes.

“You know, Ned,” she says. “I have this horrible feeling like you’re trying to make a point.”

“Peter’s—been through a lot,” Ned says, and glances at her for half a second before looking away again. “With his uncle. And then, you know—other stuff.”

_Stuff,_ MJ thinks.

“You mean stuff like dying and then dealing with two alternate realities,” she guesses. “Rattling around in his head?”

“Yeah,” Ned says. “Stuff like that.”

She nods, and it doesn’t feel like enough, so she ignores the way she feels a little cold, even now, so far away from the roof, and says, “I know.”

“And it’s just sort of—” Ned sighs. “Ugh, I’m not good at this.”

Because that’s not suspicious at all.

“What exactly is _this_?”

“It’s just—I need—when Peter comes back to school—” He breaks off halfway through each thought, has to take a second before trying again. “I don’t know if you’re planning on, like, doing anything, or anything like that—”

“Can this conversation not be happening?” MJ asks, and gives the cafeteria doors another thought. “I need this conversation to not be happening.”

“ _But_ ,” Ned says. “I need you to promise that you’ll be…I don’t know. Careful? I mean, like I said, he’s been through a lot, and I don’t know—”

He keeps talking, but MJ’s only about 73% listening, because the other 27% of her is working very hard on trying not to go completely beet-red with realization.

“Ned Leeds,” she says finally, and Ned stutters to a stop halfway through his rambling. “Are you trying to give me a shovel talk?”

“No,” Ned says, too quick, and then reconsiders. “Yes? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Good,” MJ says. “You’re covering all the bases, then.”

“I think so,” he says. “Yeah, I’m gonna go with _yes_. Yes, this is a shovel talk.”

Okay, MJ thinks.

So she probably had this coming.

And it’s way too weird, to just sit there and be discussing all of this so casually, like she hadn’t had a small nervous breakdown when she’d connected the dots on her own, like this is the most natural conversation to be having halfway through lunch with Ned Leeds.

“Okay,” she says, and lays her book down on the table, because she might as well do this right, right? “Let’s hear it.”

Ned shrugs. “That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s my shovel talk.”

MJ nods. “Good effort.”

“Thanks.”

He’s back to studying his fork, and MJ realizes suddenly that she hasn’t actually given anything resembling a coherent answer. Feelings, she thinks, are just the absolute worst.

“Alright,” she says. “So I’m not good at this, either.”

Ned doesn’t try to say something like _no, you’ll be fine_ or _just give it a shot_ , the way Liz or MJ’s mother or probably even Pete Parker would do.

Instead, he nods sagely and says, “This is not new information.”

“Shut up,” she snaps, but there’s no heat in it. “I’m trying to be heartfelt.”

“Oh, my bad, so sorry.”

“You should be,” MJ shoots back, just as a reflex. “So, um. I don’t know what happens next. Either.”

It feels— It feels way too much like a confession.

This is different, somehow, from texting Liz and then lying there grinning like an idiot for more time than she’s fully prepared to admit.

This feels—heavier, somehow.

Talking to Liz was fun, and easy, and this is—not.

This is something else.

“I’ve—” she starts to say, and then realizes she doesn’t really know where she’s going with it. “I mean, obviously, this is not something I’ve necessarily done. Before.”

Ned’s still watching her, and he looks about as uncomfortable as she feels, so that’s fair, at least, she guesses.

If he could plow through that halfhearted speech earlier, she can do the same.

“But—I’m not here to make his life harder, Leeds,” MJ says at last, and it’s the truth. “I’ll figure out what’s happening—when it happens.”

It’s the most she can do.

Because, honestly, Liz’s conspicuous silence and Ned’s awkward needling aside, the truth of the matter is that she has no clue what happens next, and it really comes down to Parker, doesn’t it?

What happens, happens, but she thinks she should probably talk it over with the Spider in question before she says anything else.

Ned hasn’t looked away yet, and MJ lifts one shoulder in a shrug, tries for her usually, detached sort of tone.

“Is that good enough?” she asks, and it comes out way too serious.

Ned studies her for a long moment.

Then he shrugs right back at her, and just like that, it’s over.

“Eh,” he says. “For now.”

“Good, because it’s all you’re getting.”

He laughs obligingly, the same way Parker does when someone says something that’s not actually funny, but he feels like being polite.

MJ can’t help but wonder which one of them started doing that first.

They sit in silence for a little longer, and then MJ glances over, out of the corner of her eye, just in time to see Ned looking away.

It’s just awkward enough to be funny, and so she cracks half a smile.

“This is weird,” she says. “Right?”

“It’s very weird,” Ned agrees immediately. “Yes.”

MJ grins, but it feels kind of tired, and Ned’s staring at his phone a little too closely.

_I talked to him earlier today._

“So,” she says, and nods at Ned’s phone when he glances up. “How is he?”

Ned shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve been texting between class, but I guess he’s got stuff he’s doing.”

MJ nods, thinks about that.

She probably ought to let the conversation drop, let Ned retreat back to his side of the lunch table again and continue on in this mutual coexistence.

Instead, she says, “Any chance this stuff might casually be flying to another planet?”

“Oh my god, _right?_ ”

The answer bursts out of Ned almost before she’s finished talking, and MJ almost laughs out loud again.

“It’s insane,” she says, and doesn’t know what, specifically, she’s referring to. “It’s absolutely insane.”

“It’s so insane!” Ned complains, frustration clear in every word. “Because, like, I want to be all like, _hey, dude, tell me about the alien planet where you died,_ but I don’t want to make things weird—”

“Yeah, that’d probably do it.”

“And he got to meet _Thor_ ,” he says. “And the Scarlet Witch! And the Black Widow! And Captain America—”

“And the Black Panther,” MJ puts in.

“Yeah, but he’d met him already,” Ned says, and she gapes at him.

“How is that _not_ the biggest draw?”

“It is,” he concedes. “But also there’s no way I think I can get an invite to meet the Black Panther.”

Distantly, MJ thinks that this is the exact thing she’s made fun of him and Parker for, talking about super-classified stuff in the middle of everyone—but it’s so much, how could they not talk about this?

So, yeah, she’s kind of a hypocrite.

She’ll live with it.

“And you think you can meet Captain America?” she asks, and Ned shrugs.

“He might feel sorry for me.”

“That’s your strategy, a pity invite?”

Ned scoffs, adopting a wounded air.

“I am a young, promising high school student,” he says solemnly. “Doesn’t he have a patriotic obligation to come lecture me about reproductive health?”

MJ winces at the reminder of the painful videos that the school feels the need to roll out at apparently every occasion.

“Maybe he’ll feel sorry that we have to sit through those,” she muses.

“ _I_ feel sorry that we have to sit through those,” Ned grumbles.

“You haven’t seen the detention one,” MJ says.

“Is it bad?”

“He sits backwards in a chair.”

“Oh, God,” Ned says.

“Because, you know, it’s cool. And hip.”

“Oh, _God_.”

MJ laughs in spite of herself, and suddenly this is a thing that happens, now.

She goes to lunch every day, like normal, and apparently Ned has decided that, because they share probably the biggest secret in the history of secrets, they’re apparently Friends, now.

MJ wonders, sometimes, if this is how Ned makes friends with everyone—if this is how Parker makes friends with everyone—just pick a person and decide, _yep, that is now my person, and we are Friends._

It’s weird.

She doesn’t hate it, though.

She complains when Ned spreads out all his notes over the table and talks too loudly about which of the Avengers is undeniably the coolest—“It’s the Black Panther, Leeds, end of discussion.” “Okay, fair, but after him”—and she rolls her eyes when he tries to tell her in the loudest whisper ever about the latest updates from Stark and Parker—

But she doesn’t hate it.

Not really.

Not at all.

At any rate, she knows it could be a lot worse.

For a lot of reasons, but mostly because, the day after Ned drops the _I-know-that-you-know_ bombshell on her, they’re in practice, and Flash is smarting over the fact that she just rotated him out of the practice lineup, so he looks around for a target and sees Ned talking to Betty in the spectator section of their practice room.

“Hey, Leeds,” he snaps, loud enough that the whole team’s listening. “Stop flirting and try to actually help practice, yeah?”

“Says the guy who just forgot the chemical formula for glucose,” MJ says, mild, and Flash scowls, but she’s not really paying attention.

Instead, she watches as Ned’s face turns bright red, and he looks between Betty and Flash almost desperately before hurrying up to take his seat on the panel.

Betty doesn’t seem too put out.

The next day, Ned makes it halfway through lunch before looking all smug and amused and saying, “So, seriously, you never answered my question—”

“Betty Brant,” MJ says, and he doesn’t mention her Inconvenient Crush again.

It’s not a truce.

It’s more like—détente, MJ figures.

She can live with that.

But as the weeks go on, Ned starts looking at his phone more and more, getting shifty about it, and MJ thinks she might have to take some proactive measures.

So she tells Betty and Cindy that she needs to brush up on the evolutionary history overlap between life sciences and social sciences, because she’s not sure she’s got that nailed down.

This is only partially a lie.

“I can help you study!” Betty says, bright.

“After practice?” MJ asks, and Betty hesitates, like she knew she would.

“I have work after school. How about during lunch?”

Ned sends her a look of utmost betrayal when he turns up at lunch the next day and sees Betty and Cindy sitting at their usual table, but MJ gives him her best blank look in return.

“Betty’s helping me study,” she tells him, very serious. “We’ve got a meet next week, Leeds.”

By the time lunch is over, he’s recovered enough to engage in an almost-normal conversation with the three of them.

MJ’s counting it as a win.

She’s pretty sure Ned is, too, if the way he lights up when Betty says “we’ll cover the rest of this tomorrow” is any indication.

“Tomorrow,” MJ says, and only feels a little bit smug. “Cool.”

They never manage to get all the way to making it an official AcaDec table, because, again, Flash exists, and also because all of them are in at least one other club, so usually there’s a couple kids missing, sitting with a team or club on the other side of the cafeteria.

But it’s—nice, MJ guesses.

Kind of weird.

But after the first day, even as their table starts to fill up and MJ learns to cram her reading time into the subway ride home, or the time in between classes—

Her teammates leave a seat empty.

Sometimes it’s the seat next to Ned, and sometimes it’s the seat next to her, and sometimes it’s just a random space on the bench around the table.

No one ever really talks about Parker.

It’s just too much, and there are too many questions, and MJ’s sure they all remember the way Parker was before he took time off—

No one talks about him.

But sometimes MJ looks at the empty space on the other side of the table, or just at her elbow, and she’s so suddenly, fiercely grateful for this dumb little group of nerds.

Because no one’s forgotten him, either.

So that’s how it goes for one week, and then for another week, and then for a little longer after that.

Flash grumbles about how it must be nice, getting the school to give you a whole freaking month off, just for a mental health day—

“What are you trying to say about mental health awareness, _Eugene?_ ” Betty snaps, and Flash shuts up pretty darn quick, because he’s still trying to pretend that his first name doesn’t exist.

MJ doesn’t laugh out loud, but it’s a real near miss.

No one else brings up their missing teammate, and it’s quiet, but it’s enough.

It’s enough, for a while.

And then two things happen in rapid succession, and suddenly it’s not enough—or, if it was, it’s at least not a thing anymore.

Spider-Man makes his first appearance in two weeks.

And the next day, Peter Parker is back at school.

Just like that.

The newspapers go crazy.

Something about superheroes, MJ thinks.

Superhero stories demand to be told in newspapers.

Not that she actually buys a newspaper.

But literally all her social media accounts blow up with the newest sighting— _Spider-Man’s back! Friendly neighborhood superhero saves mother and children from traffic collision!_ —and MJ sits on her bed, where she was getting dressed for school, and stares at her phone until she realizes she’s going to be late if she doesn’t get a move on right now.

At first, she thinks that’s all it will be, that this is just him getting his training wheels, heading back out into the real world, and she wishes there was a way she could say _hey, good job, man_ without sounding condescending or vaguely maternal or without having to track him down in the first place.

And then she slips into her first period class literal seconds before the bell rings—

Ned’s there already, and he usually starts talking to her as soon as she enters the room, but he doesn’t today, because—

_Because._

Parker looks up when she walks in, and she’s definitely not looking at Leeds right now.

She thinks she stands stock still for a second too long, but then she remembers to act like a normal person and slides into her seat just as the bell rings.

“Parker,” she says, and mentally congratulates herself for sounding totally normal.

He nods right back at her, but looks like he’s trying not to smile.

“Jones,” he says.

“Good to see you back with us,” MJ says, and stops herself from saying _back in the land of the living_ at the last moment.

“Oh, well, you know,” Parker says, and shrugs. “Good to be seen.”

MJ chews hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.

“Lame,” she says, and then Mrs. Evans is talking, and she’s got to force her attention back to the front of the room, or risk their English teacher calling her out for not focusing.

Ned’s trying too hard to catch her eye, and she ignores him, ducks her head over her work, ignores both of them until the bell rings.

She’s never claimed to be good at this.

Some very cliché part of her wants to text Liz, demand an explanation, but Liz still hasn’t brought up the elephant—or the spider—in the room since MJ’s blunt no a couple months ago, and besides, that would be really ridiculously cliché.

When the bell rings, Parker’s swamped by the whole AcaDec team, it feels like, and he’s looking a little overwhelmed, but Ned manages to beat the crowd back enough for the two of them to make their escape to Physics, and MJ lets herself be caught up in the crush of people left behind.

“You think he’s okay?” Betty wonders, looking in the direction where Leeds and Parker have fled.

Flash opens his mouth, and MJ says, “ _Don’t start_ ” at the same time as Betty and Cindy.

He holds up his hands in surrender, and then he’s gone before MJ can even wonder why he came over in the first place.

Parker’s just a head bobbing away in the crowd of students, and she watches him go, wonders absently at the fact that his ears don’t stick out when he’s wearing the mask.

_After practice_ , she thinks.

She’ll tell him after AcaDec practice.

As it turns out, things—don’t really work out that way.

Mr. Harrington is pretty hands-off when it comes to club stuff, usually content to help them with the administrative details and leave the practices up to the team itself, but he usually steps in right before a competition, plays the role of questioner so that everyone on the team can have the chance to practice—

MJ knows this.

She’s always known this.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise.

And yet—

Ten minutes into practice, Mr. Harrington snags the flashcards out of her hands and nods towards the row of chairs they’ve arranged behind the desk, like a real competition.

“Flash, rotate out,” he says. “We need to brush up on literature questions.”

MJ blinks. Flash grumbles, mutinous, but surrenders his seat, waves sarcastically for MJ to take his place—

Right next to Parker.

_Right_ , MJ thinks, and this really, really shouldn’t feel like a big deal.

It kind of does, though.

She takes the seat as Flash slinks back towards the spectator row, fiddles with her bell, like it’s somehow changed since the last time it was _ding_ -ed.

“Hey,” Parker says, and MJ looks over to see him giving this dorky little wave.

She rolls her eyes to keep from doing something embarrassing like smiling.

“Focus, Parker,” she says.

He holds his hand half an inch above the bell, overly dramatic, and she almost rolls her eyes again.

Ned’s staring at both of them.

It’s _not_ subtle.

MJ reaches out to fiddle with the bell again, catches herself just in time, pulls her hands back and isn’t sure where to put them—

It isn’t until Cindy rings in and says “Huckleberry Finn?” in a deeply uncertain voice that MJ realizes she’s let a ridiculously easy literature question blow right over her head.

Parker nudges her with his elbow, and when she glances over, he has the audacity to grin.

“Focus, Jones,” he says, and she glares at him until Ned laughs, and then she has to split her effort and glare at both of them.

“Shut up,” she mumbles, and it’s way too halfhearted to have any real effect.

Parker just grins even wider, and she’s seriously considering dying right there on the spot, until Mr. Harrington says— “Name the 20th century novel that tells the story of the following characters: Odenigbo—”

“ _Half of a Yellow Sun_ ,” MJ says immediately, and the world is back on its axis.

The next couple questions are history-based, and then there’s a math question, and then she fields another question about _A Separate Peace_ , even though her official opinion on that book is that it needs to be taken out back and shot—

“Oh, here’s one for you, MJ,” Mr. Harrington says absently, as though she hasn’t been snapping up every literature question since the unfortunate Huckleberry Finn response. “Name the author of the 19th century novel in which the following quote is found—”

MJ holds her hand just over the bell.

“ _It is necessary to have wished for death_ —”

Her hand freezes.

“— _to know how good it is to live_.”

She knows the answer.

Of course she does.

The bell right next to her rings, and she jumps.

“ _Count of Monte Cristo_ ,” Parker says, and then gives his head a little shake. “Uh. Alexandre Dumas.”

He’s not looking at her.

MJ pulls her hand back from the bell.

“Um, yes,” Mr. Harrington says, and checks the card. “That’s right.”

Parker’s not looking at her—he’s looking at the bell, at his hands, at the clock on the wall, pretty much anywhere else.

It doesn’t make sense.

Suddenly, MJ’s had enough.

“Excuse me,” she mumbles, and before anyone can stop her, she’s out of her seat, grabs her backpack, and is heading for the door, without really knowing why.

“Wait, MJ—”

But the door closes behind her before she can figure out who spoke, or figure out what they were trying to say.

For a second, she stands in the hall, uncertain.

Then she figures it’s just a matter of time before they send Betty or Cindy out after her, and so she heads off down the hall, hangs a right at the end, goes up a flight of stairs—

She ends up on the roof.

Of course she does.

Where else would she go?

MJ unlocks the roof access door with the key she copied off the janitor last year, climbs another flight of stairs, and then pushes open another door to stand on the roof.

There’s a thin layer of dust spread out across the flatness, and she makes a face before picking her way over to the edge.

As far as heights go, this isn’t so bad.

She can handle this.

_Okay,_ she thinks, and rubs her arms against the chill. _So that was probably a little bit of an overreaction_.

It was a lot easier to say _I’ll figure it out_ and _we’ll see what happens_ when there wasn’t any actual chance of anything happening.

But now—

MJ stands there, leaving footprints in the dust, and wonders how long it’s been since someone’s been up here with a broom.

Probably a good long while.

She’s not sure how long she studies those footprints, but eventually she shakes herself out of it, tries to figure out how she’s going to walk back into AcaDec practice without being all _yes, hello, it is I, I have returned._

She should go back down, she tells herself.

Even if they don’t send anyone to look for her, it’ll get awkward if she’s just hanging out up here and no one knows where she’s gone.

People are kind of jumpy about school security, these days.

At any rate, she doesn’t want to get the janitor in trouble for the keys.

There’s a footstep behind her.

MJ spins around, ready to give Betty some ridiculously over-the-top explanation for her total freakout in practice—

It’s not Betty.

“I wasn’t sure where you’d be,” Parker says, pushing his hands into his pockets.

MJ looks at her own pair of footprints that lead back towards the door, looks at the footprints Parker leaves now that start apparently in the middle of the roof.

_Subtle._

“Well,” she says. “Here I am.”

Parker nods, crosses the roof to stand next to her, hands still in his pockets and gaze fixed somewhere across the buildings.

It’s not like there’s much of a view.

“Here you are,” he agrees, and MJ follows his gaze.

Distantly, she wonders if he sees all these buildings differently than she does, if he looks at the skylines and sees potential anchors, places to latch onto, places to swing from.

“So,” she says, after enough time has passed.

“So,” he echoes, and MJ feels a sudden rush of—not nostalgia, not exactly, but something dangerously close.

“This is—familiar,” she says.

She doesn’t mean it to be a confession.

But Parker, standing beside her, is silent for a few moments longer.

Then he nods, like he should have seen this coming, like this is exactly what he expected to happen.

“You know,” he says.

It’s not a question.

MJ thinks about giving a flippant response.

It doesn’t feel right.

“I know,” she says instead.

Parker nods again. “Right.”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since the beginning,” MJ says, before immediately wondering if that’s too vague, if he doesn’t remember, and then mentally telling herself to get a grip. “Since—the beginning.”

Parker doesn’t say anything to that.

Suddenly uncertain, MJ risks another look at him. “Is that—okay?”

He blinks.

“What?”

“That I know,” she says, and it comes out a little too nervous for her tastes. “Is that—are you okay with that?”

“What—yeah, of course!” Parker blurts, like he’s stunned she even has to ask. “Of course!”

“Oh,” MJ says, because she can’t think of anything else.

“Of course,” he says again, and she suddenly has to look away once more.

“Okay,” she says.

They stand there for a little bit longer, and MJ wonders if the rest of the team is still down in practice, or if they’ve all gone home already—no, she definitely hasn’t been up here for _that_ long.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” Parker asks, after a few minutes.

“Tell you—that I knew?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” MJ says, because at this point, it’s her party line, and she’s sticking to it. “I think probably. Eventually.”

Parker laughs a little.

“Yeah,” he says, in a distant kind of way. “I know how that goes.”

And then that’s all he says, like there aren’t a million follow-up questions coming out of that brief little statement, like that’s all there is to it.

MJ looks over at him, suspicious.

“You’re taking this awfully calmly,” she can’t help observing.

“Am I?” MJ squints at him.

“You already—” she starts, and then can’t help feeling just a little bit cheated. “You knew that I knew.”

He grins. “Well, how did you know that I knew that you knew?”

“Parker,” she says. “Come on.”

“I didn’t know,” he admits. “But I suspected.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“It’s enough,” he says, and shrugs before she can press him for details. “And Stark said—”

He breaks off mid-sentence, and MJ feels an honest-to-goodness chill shoot down her spine.

“What did Stark say?” she demands.

Belatedly, she realizes that the question came out a little too quickly, because Parker just looks at her some more.

“Just that he thought you already knew,” he says. “That I shouldn’t—that he thought you already knew.”

“Oh,” MJ says, relieved. “Right.”

Of course, the relief only lasts a few seconds, because then Parker says, “Why?”

“Uh,” she says. “No reason.”

Which, yeah, is maybe not the most inconspicuous thing she could have said.

“What did you think he said?” Parker asks, and either she’s completely delusional, or he looks suddenly like he’s trying not to smile.

“Never mind,” she mumbles.

“MJ,” he says, and yep, he’s definitely trying not to smile now. “What did you think I was going to say?”

“I don’t know. Something else.”

“ _MJ_. Come on.”

MJ makes her fatal mistake then, because she looks at him, and he just looks so ridiculous, hands in his pockets and looking at her like he doesn’t have a clue what she’s trying to avoid saying.

“Stop looking at me,” she says, before she can think better of it.

He blinks, all false innocence. “I can’t.”

“Cute,” she says. “Stop looking at me.”

He laughs, finally, but turns his head so that he’s looking away, staring resolute out over the edge of the roof. “This better?”

Not really.

But it’s the best she’s going to get.

_I’m not trying to make his life harder._

_I’ll figure it out. When it happens._

_Have you told him yet?_

“Okay,” MJ says at last. “Okay, so I’m going to say something, and I need you to not react until I’m done, okay?”

“This is terrifying,” Parker says, and MJ scoffs, because _yeah, you’re telling me_.

“Yeah, no kidding,” she says, and it’s easier without him looking right at her, but it’s not _that_ much easier. “So, um, I thought—when you said that Stark had said—I thought you meant—God, this is hard—”

“Can I look back now?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Parker doesn’t look back, but he reaches out and hits her directly in the arm, and then fumbles around until he can find her hand, laces his fingers through her own.

MJ stares at their hands.

For a full five seconds, she loses track of where she was going with the conversation, and she just looks at the space between them until her brain catches up with her.

“Is,” she says, and then tries again. “Is this supposed to be helping?”

“I don’t know,” Parker says, still with his head turned oh-so-carefully away. “It kind of helped me.”

Right.

The last time they were on the roof.

She can do this, MJ thinks.

She can do this.

“I just—you were with Liz,” she says, and then mentally cringes, because way to bring that up, really, just great thinking. “And Liz is awesome, she’s, like, the best person ever, and I didn’t want to try and take away from that—and I knew what you were like, when you were around Liz, and I didn’t—you weren’t—it wasn’t the same—”

She’s rambling, she realizes, and forces herself to stop.

She can do this.

“MJ,” Parker says, voice quiet and sounding half strangled, like he wants so badly to turn and look at her. “Please, I don’t know what you’re trying to say—”

“How could you not?”

The question jumps out of her, and she has just enough time to be absolutely mortified.

Then she thinks, _nope, this is happening, one way or another, figure this out_ —

“Peter,” she says, and it’s weird, using his first name, except for all the ways in which it isn’t weird at all. “How could you not know?”

She’s still not saying what she wants to.

Not really.

But it sort of feels like maybe she is.

For a long second, he doesn’t say anything, and so neither does she, and they’re just standing there like two absolute idiots, holding hands and not actually looking at each other.

Then Parker says, “Are you kidding me?”

MJ’s gaze snaps back over to him, and his shoulders are shaking, just a little, and she gapes at him.

“Are you _laughing?_ ” she demands.

Before she can think it all the way through, she pushes his shoulder so that he turns around, and he’s definitely laughing.

“No,” he says, eyes wide, like he’s just realized his mistake. “I’m not—”

“I swear to God, Parker. I swear, if you’re laughing at me right now, I will literally exsanguinate you—”

“No, I’m not—not at you,” he says, and something about his voice is different, is so impossibly true, and he’s not laughing.

Not really.

Not anymore.

“Not at you,” he says again, like a promise.

MJ looks at him.

He’s still holding her hand, and when he turned back to face her, he must have moved—or maybe she did—because he’s too close, all of the sudden.

She should step back, she thinks.

She should pull her hand away from his, take a step back, try and figure out what he means by that, try to figure out what was so funny, try to figure out she’s supposed to handle this—

She should step back.

Instead, she takes another step closer, hopes like hell that she’s not messing everything up, and she kisses him.

It’s awkward for about a second and a half, because, in MJ’s admittedly limited experience, surprise kisses don’t usually work out as well as they do in movies, in terms of making sure everybody’s on board with the whole thing.

Except Parker gets with the program pretty quick, so maybe it’s not that much of a surprise, after all.

It’s not awkward, after that.

When they break apart, MJ bites her lip just long enough to catch her breath.

Then, because her brain is still apparently running on autopilot, she says, “You’re still too short.”

Parker laughs, and it’s something she’s heard so many times before, but everything sounds different from just a breath away.

“What?”

“You’re too short,” she says again, and lets her nose brush against the side of his cheek. “It doesn’t really—work out.”

“I don’t know,” Parker says, and when she pulls back far enough to look at him, she sees his mouth pressed into a thin line, like he’s trying so hard not to smile. “I think things worked out alright.”

“God, you’re so mushy.”

“Mushy?”

“Mushy,” she says, and pokes his stomach, which is pretty much the exact opposite of mushy, and, oh, right, superhero.

She’d almost forgotten.

“I can live with that,” Parker says, and when he kisses her, it doesn’t feel awkward at all.

It feels like—it feels like it did, on that one day before the bus trip, when they were at the highest point of an arc, and they’d just been hanging there, weightless, in the middle of the sky.

It feels like falling, and it feels like an AcaDec question where she knows the answer before the question’s over, and it feels like sitting on a rooftop somewhere in Queens with her eyes closed and saying _come back and ask me again later_ —

It feels like flying, and the tiny part of her brain that isn’t otherwise currently occupied can’t help but think, _God, that’s so cliché_.

She thinks she’s okay with it, though.

Just this once.

Finally, finally, she remembers that she sort of needs to breathe, and so she breaks away, pulls back just a few inches, and tries to regain some semblance of a normal thought pattern.

Parker’s hand is tangled in her hair, so that their foreheads are still bumping up against each other, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees that all the hairs on the back of his arm are standing straight up.

MJ reaches out her own hand, presses her fingers against bumps on his arm, like that’ll be enough to make them go away.

She thinks about the rooftop, before, when he’d rubbed his hands against his arms and told her about what it meant to be Spider-Man, the way he could feel things, before they happened.

She wonders what this feels like from his end.

She wonders if he saw this coming.

Parker’s watching her closely, so closely, and so she just brushes her thumb back and forth across his wrist and tries to think of something perfect to say.

Instead, she remembers the scene that prompted her exit in the first place, and she blurts, “Oh, Ned’s going to be so freaking smug.”

“What—Ned knew?”

He sounds utterly betrayed, and MJ can’t help but laugh at his tone.

“Apparently everyone knew,” she says.

“Who’s everyone?”

“Everyone, Parker,” she says, because certainly Ned and certainly Liz and certainly Tony Stark, and almost certainly their entire AcaDec team, if the fact that he was the one to come looking for her is any indication. “Everyone knows.”

Parker thinks about that.

“I didn’t know,” he says, still sounding a little put out.

MJ blinks. “What?”

“That’s why I was laughing,” he says, eyes focusing on the place where her fingers are still curled around his wrist. “Before.”

“I remember.”

“I talked to Mr. Stark, and told him—that I thought I should tell you—everything.”

It’s gratifying, MJ thinks, to know that she wasn’t the only idiot going into this conversation.

“And I thought you wouldn’t—I was so sure—I mean, I had no idea.”

He spits the last part out all in a rush, and then stops dodging her gaze and gives her a rueful little smile.

“I didn’t know,” he says again.

And MJ believes him, of course, but she thinks about how transparent she apparently was to literally everyone else in the whole city, it seems, and it seems to defy belief.

“You really didn’t know?” she asks.

“I really didn’t know,” he agrees.

She hums a little, thinking it over.

“Well,” she says, after a sufficiently dramatic pause. “That’s because you’re crap at secrets in general.”

Parker laughs out loud.

“No, I’m not,” he protests. “I’m great at secrets.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m the best at secrets. Promise.”

“Promise,” MJ echoes, and then she laughs, too. “Well, you’ve got me fooled.”

He huffs. “Don’t be mean.”

“I don’t know how else to be,” MJ says, and she’s only half joking, which is sort of fun, because she doesn’t realize it until after the words have left her mouth.

But Parker doesn’t laugh, just meets her gaze again, so that it’s almost too much, all quiet and sincere, and says, “We both know that’s not true.”

He’s too nice.

It’s really kind of ridiculous, how freaking _nice_ Peter Parker is.

Even if she hadn’t met him on the streetlamp, MJ thinks, or even if he and Ned hadn’t been incapable of talking in a whisper in any and all of their classes—

Surely she would have known, wouldn’t she?

Surely she would have known he was Spider-Man, because, really, who else was it ever going to be?

Who else could it have ever been?

“Do we?” she asks, just to have something to say, and he shrugs.

“Sure,” he says.

MJ almost kisses him again, just for that alone—

But then there’s a burst of chatter from somewhere far below, and MJ lets go of him, glances over the edge of the roof and has just enough time to see the doors opening to the front of the school before Parker catches her hand again and they both jump back out of sight.

“Oh god,” MJ blurts, because she is not ready to deal with Ned being all I-told-you-so, not just yet.

“They’re going to know where we went,” Parker says, looking like he’s thinking pretty much the exact same thing.

“ _How?_ ”

“I don’t know,” he protests. “Ned just _knows_ things.”

She gives him a Look, and he folds pretty much immediately.

“Yeah, I know,” he mumbles. “Crap at secrets.”

MJ laughs, and he grins right back at her, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

And that’s funny, too, isn’t it?

Because it really does seem kind of easy.

Like the easiest thing in the world.

“We could go,” she says, and Parker’s eyes jump between her and the skyline, far away, almost too quick to be seen.

“Yeah?” he asks. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” MJ says, deliberately casual. “I’m sure you know someplace cool.”

He laughs again, like the idea of him knowing anything cool is just way too ridiculous to be believed. “I really don’t.”

The noise of the team a few stories below is getting louder, like they’re all just standing around talking and not heading home right away.

“Well, then,” she says. “I’ll just settle for somewhere else.”

“Fair enough,” Parker says. “Do I—should I—”

She blinks at him for a few seconds before she realizes what he’s offering, and then, almost before she can finish nodding her head, they’re airborne, just for a second, just for a split second, and then they’re landing with a thud in the alley behind the school.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” MJ says, picking her way carefully around a pile of garbage that looks like it’s been there since the last millennium. “This is _extremely_ cool.”

Parker laughs sarcastically, and she roots around in her backpack for her bottle of hand sanitizer, which requires pulling a couple notebooks half out of her bag—

“Need help with those?”

The question startles her out of her search, startles her because of its familiarity, and then she remembers, all at once, and bites on her cheek to keep from smiling, racks her brain to remember her line, remember what comes next.

“Spider-Man’s offering to carry my books?” she asks, and Parker grins, but it rounds out pretty quickly, into something a little less practiced.

“Nope,” he says, and waves a hand to indicate his whole state, just in general. “Just—you know. Just me.”

And MJ thinks about how she could argue the point, tell him that they’re one and the same, or that there’s no difference between the two—

But that’s not what he’s saying, she doesn’t think.

At the end of the day, before there was Spider-Man, there was Peter Parker, and the fact that the one would never have existed without the other doesn’t matter.

Not really.

She could argue it—

“Well,” she says instead, and lets him take the notebooks she’s got balanced in one hand. “If you’re offering.”

In the end, it’s Peter Parker that ends up walking her home, not Spider-Man, and this is something new, this is definitely something that she’s never done before—except for the three times before this—except it doesn’t feel new, not really.

It feels familiar, and it feels easy, all too easy, to slot her hand through his as they walk, and to roll her eyes when he makes a lame pun, and to badger him with questions about where he’s been, the last few weeks, what he’s seen, what he’s been doing—

When they reach her doorstep, it’s late in the day, that perfect golden hour that she’s tried and tried and tried to get right in all her sketchbooks and notepads, but never seems to be able to quite manage it.

“See you tomorrow,” Parker says, and MJ tries to trace back in her mind the moment it went from _see you around_ to _see you later_ to this.

She can’t remember.

There must have been a moment, one single moment when it changed, and she didn't notice.

She can't remember.

But that’s alright.

She thinks she’ll remember this time.

The sun slants through the buildings all around them, and Parker’s still standing there on the sidewalk below, so that when MJ looks at him, she can see the rest of the week unfolding—the fumbling awkwardness, and the weird readjustment period, and how smug Ned will be when he sees them in the morning—

(The way his hand had brushed through her hair, the way his voice had caught, with his head still turned away.)

The week unfolds so easily in front of her, in the amber light of the late afternoon, cold and crisp and nothing at all like what she would have ever expected, and then the week beyond that, and the week beyond that—

It’s a start.

“Yeah,” MJ says, and doesn’t bite her cheek, so that her smile feels wide enough to split her face, and Parker’s looking up at her and smiling just as bright. “See you tomorrow.”

**Author's Note:**

> And that's a wrap!
> 
> Thank you so, so much for sticking with this series! The first story was the first fanfiction I'd ever published, and everybody was so sweet and encouraging, and just thank you guys, 1000 times!


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